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Announcing Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances
- froo 18y agoThis is actually very interesting news for someone like me who would open up a good number of high CPU instances at any one time but only for short periods to do some rendering. Typically a few hours Now I guess I gotta do a cost analysis and figure out which will be better, as both models have their strengths and weaknesses for my particular use.
- mjtokelly 18y agoIf your capacity requirements are very steady, you could save more than 30% on CPU time with this. At the very least, figure out how many instances you need at 3am and buy that many reservations. That's what I'll be doing tomorrow.
- moe 18y agoOr in other words: Figure out how many of your instances are running 24/7 and buy that many reservations. By comitting to a small instance for one year you get it for $48/month instead of $72/month. If you commit for 3 years the price drops to $35/month. Not too shabby.
- gommm 18y agoI always have at least one instance running so it's good for saving money... At this price point it's actually cheaper than a vps at slicehost: 325/12 + 720*.03 = 49$ slicehost for an equivalent instance it's between 70$ and 130$ (but need to count the included bandwidth from slicehost to be more fair)
- numair 18y agoCan someone create a nifty JavaScript calculator for this?
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- moe 18y agoSure. Copy to clipboard, then middle click in firefox: javascript:var%20si=prompt(%22how%20many%20of%20your%20small%20instances%20run%2024/7?%22);var%20sip=(si(0.1243653)/3/12).toFixed();var%20sip_1yr=(si(0.0324365+325)/12).toFixed();var%20sip_3yr=(si(0.03243653+500)/3/12).toFixed();var%20li=prompt(%22how%20many%20of%20your%20large%20instances%20run%2024/7?%22);var%20lip=(li(0.4243653)/3/12).toFixed();var%20lip_1yr=(li(0.1224365+1300)/12).toFixed();var%20lip_3yr=(li(0.12243653+2600)/3/12).toFixed();var%20xli=prompt(%22how%20many%20of%20your%20extra%20large%20instances%20run%2024/7?%22);var%20xlip=(xli(0.8243653)/3/12).toFixed();var%20xlip_1yr=(xli(0.2424365+2600)/12).toFixed();var%20xlip_3yr=(xli(0.2424365*3+4000)/3/12).toFixed();window.location.href=%22_blank%22;document.write(%22<h1>Potential%20savings</h1>%22);if(0<si){document.write(%22<h2>%22+si+%22%20Small%20instances</h2>%22);document.write(%22%22);document.write(%22<table%20border=1>%22);document.write(%22<tr>%22);document.write(%22%20<td> </td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>Normal</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>1yr%20Reservation</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>3yr%20Reservation</td>%22);document.write(%22</tr>%22);document.write(%22<tr>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>Effective%20Monthly%20Fee</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>$%22+sip+%22</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>$%22+sip_1yr+%22</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>$%22+sip_3yr+%22</td>%22);document.write(%22</tr>%22);document.write(%22</table>%22)}if(0<li){document.write(%22<h2>%22+li+%22%20Large%20instances</h2>%22);document.write(%22%22);document.write(%22<table%20border=1>%22);document.write(%22<tr>%22);document.write(%22%20<td> </td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>Normal</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>1yr%20Reservation</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>3yr%20Reservation</td>%22);document.write(%22</tr>%22);document.write(%22<tr>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>Effective%20Monthly%20Fee</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>$%22+lip+%22</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>$%22+lip_1yr+%22</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>$%22+lip_3yr+%22</td>%22);document.write(%22</tr>%22);document.write(%22</table>%22)}if(0<xli){document.write(%22<h2>%22+xli+%22%20Extra%20Large%20instances</h2>%22);document.write(%22%22);document.write(%22<table%20border=1>%22);document.write(%22<tr>%22);document.write(%22%20<td> </td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>Normal</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>1yr%20Reservation</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>3yr%20Reservation</td>%22);document.write(%22</tr>%22);document.write(%22<tr>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>Effective%20Monthly%20Fee</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>$%22+xlip+%22</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>$%22+xlip_1yr+%22</td>%22);document.write(%22%20<td>$%22+xlip_3yr+%22</td>%22);document.write(%22</tr>%22);document.write(%22</table>%22)}void%20(0);
- gojomo 18y agoOr, "slightly less elastic" instances. Is there a resale/arbitrage opportunity here? Buy a bunch of reserved instances, resell at a price less than "full elastic" instances but higher than your cost (taking the risk that sometimes you might not have buyers for all your prepurchased capacity). (Amazon could make this easier or harder by controlling whether reserved quotas can be delegated to others, or how easily AMIs and traffic can flow between billing accounts.)
- bdr 18y agoAmazon has continued to iterate on AWS and execute brilliantly. They're making Google look shabby, and I'd love to know more about how their internal processes differ.
- mdasen 18y agoThe question I'm left with: What happens if/when Amazon changes what you're given with an EC2 instance? EC2 was launched in August 2006 offering the same specs for the same price that they're offering now. Since we're coming upon the three year anniversary, I don't think it's outrageous to believe that upgrades to what we're given might come within a year or so. If I commit to a small instance (1.7GB) for 3 years and in 9 months they have a new 2009 small instance which is 2.5GB, would I get that upgrade? I hate to be as simplistic as moore's law, but server capacity is increasing when you look at what you can get in a dedicated box. Amazon will have to keep parity over the long term and if you're committing to a 3-year period, you might miss out on the upgrades. In fact, this could be a way for Amazon to roll out newer, better hardware onto their network while not seeing older hardware just disused. And I guess you can't complain about getting a 1.7GB server for $35/mo (which is the three year commitment price).
- rgrieselhuber 18y agoI think this is actually a key motivator behind many of the cloud computing vendors. Hopefully some better competition will continue to keep pushing things forward.
- TimothyFitz 18y agoWe might not see upgrades any time soon, they may try to push the price of their slowest instances down. Imagine if you could get an instance for $10/mo? $5/mo? They're just buying faster hardware and figuring out how many instances they can effectively run per-machine.
- timf 18y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=513601 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=513601
- lsc 18y agoif you are willing to pay per month, there is a lot of competition in that arena. I'm one of the cheaper offerings... see http://prgmr.com/xen/ http://prgmr.com/xen/ but then, I don't have the cool provisioning system ec2 has. In fact, I need to finish up my next server before putting people on it. But yes, competition will force ec2 prices down. 4gb dual-rank registered ecc ddr2 is almost cheap enough for me to move to 64GB servers (meaning I'll be able to lower prices again.) - how much cheaper would I need to be before a service like mine became compelling vs. ec2?
- lecha 18y agoIMHO this is great, but not perfect. The model of reserved instances takes EC2 users back into the business of provisioning planning. How many instance/years should I buy for the next year? How many is too many? EC2 users are still unable to to spread the 1 year time credit over multiple instances. In principle, it costs the same to run one instance for 1000 hours than to run 1000 instances for one hour. In practice, the current model makes it impossible to capture the discount. What is needed is to able to buy a year worth of CPU time at discount, and then be free to launch as many instances as needed to use up the time credit. (more on http://weblog.smirnov.ca/2009/03/12/ec2-reserved-instances-are-great-but-not-perfect/ http://weblog.smirnov.ca/2009/03/12/ec2-reserved-instances-a...)
- ShabbyDoo 18y agoI suspect Amazon is trying to do two things simultaneously: (1) become more price competitive with traditional dedicated server offerings while still charging a premium for "on demand" compute power and (2) improving their ability to predict demand patterns over time.
- easp 18y agoI don't buy the argument that this somehow puts a big provisioning planning burden back on users. Most small users of EC2 know that they are going to need one or two instances on all the time. Amazon just lowered their base costs, making it easier for them to choose EC2 over another VPS offering. Most larger users also know they have a "base load" that they have to meet. It's not hard to imagine that a lot of sites will have 2 machines as redundant load balancers, two as redundant web/app servers, and two for a DB failover cluster. Paying in advance for these instances is a no-brainer once you've decided EC2 is for you. If figuring out the rest is too much work or involves too much uncertainty, the on-demand pricing is still compelling. "In principle, it costs the same to run one instance for 1000 hours than to run 1000 instances for one hour." This wouldn't be true if you were operating your own datacenter, and it's not true in Amazon's datacenter either. In order to offer on-demand instances, Amazon has to keep idle capacity in reserve. There is a difference in degree, since Amazon is averaging over a lot more customers, but they still have to build and maintain capacity that will sit idle for significant periods of time. By creating a new pricing tier for reserved instances, they can both reduce their uncertainty about unused capacity, and give customers a better price for making that commitment. What's really missing here is another low-priced tier for low-priority instances. These would either be suspended and paged completely to disk during times of high load, or they'd be started and killed automatically to make use of idle capacity. They could be used for long-running batch jobs.
- webfabric 18y agoSave around 300/yr on a small instance based on a 30day month
- timf 18y agoHere's a look at the new prices with different bandwidth scenarios: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=514056 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=514056
- smakz 18y agoWow, this is really great news. I use Amazon EC2 for all my web hosting and absolutely love it. Total control of a not-too-shabby box for 70$ a month was a great deal. For 40$ a month it's a downright steal. Thanks for sharing.